What can consumerism and material culture teach us about how ordinary Americans remembered their Civil War?

Buying and Selling Civil War Memory explores ways in which Americans remembered the war in their everyday lives. There was an entire industry of Civil War memory that emerged in the Gilded Age. Civil War generals appeared in advertising; uniforms continued to be manufactured and sold long after the war ended; and in many other ways the iconography of the war was used to market products. What, then, can this tell us about the way Americans remembered their war in the most quotidian ways? The editors, James Marten and Caroline E. Janney, have assembled a collection of essays that provide a new framework for examining the intersections of material culture, consumerism, and contested memory.

Each essay offers a case study of a product, experience, or idea related to how the Civil War was remembered and memorialized. Taken together, these essays trace the ways the buying and selling of the Civil War shaped Americans’ thinking about the conflict, making an important contribution to scholarship on Civil War memory and extending our understanding of subjects as varied as print culture, visual culture, popular culture, finance, the history of education, the history of the book, and the history of capitalism in this period. This highly teachable volume advances the subfield of memory studies and brings it into conversation with the literature on material culture-an exciting intellectual fusion.

The volume’s contributors include Amanda Brickell Bellows, Crompton B. Burton, Kevin R. Caprice, Shae Cox, Barbara A. Gannon, Edward John Harcourt, Anna Gibson Holloway, Jonathan S. Jones, Margaret Fairgrieve Milanick, John Neff, Paul Ringel, Natalie Sweet, David K. Thompson, and Jonathan W. White.